[3] From 1972 to 1973 he worked for the Polaroid Corporation as a consultant and historian, describing the SX-70 integral instant color photography system and preparing reports on automation study.
The day after Watson received word from Stockholm that he would share in that year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, he lectured in George Wald’s Natural Sciences 5 class about modern biology.
McElheny was several times at Cold Spring Harbor for scientific meetings and meals at the Watsons’ home, and chaired public policy sessions at a 1976 conference on environmental sources of cancer.
In 1978, McElheny left The New York Times after five years as the paper’s technology specialist to join Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory as first director of the Banbury Center.
In subsequent years, McElheny has visited Cold Spring Harbor many times, particularly to do research for his 2003 biography Watson and DNA: Making a Scientific Revolution and also to gather material for his 2010 history of the Human Genome Project for Basic Books.
Victor McElheny and his wife Ruth attended celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the double helix at the Waldorf Astoria New York in 2003, Watson’s 80th birthday in 2008, and his 90th in 2018.
In the later years of the decade of the 2010s, McElheny pursued his interest in "forced-draft national technological mobilizations, of the sort that would be needed to accelerate efforts to forestall at least some of the damage from global warming.